Every wonder why so much stuff is made in China? This is why. Look at these guys, stuffing playing cards in boxes at a superhuman rate. This video has not been sped up. No wonder China is going to kick our ass. [More]

Current and former Walmart employees in Massachusetts (and their lawyers) were awarded $40 million in back wages this week in a class-action lawsuit. The suit was filed eight years ago, and claimed that the mega-retailer owes some hourly employees up to fourteen years’ worth of unpaid overtime, missed breaks, and other uncompensated work. [More]

Massachusetts strippers have filed lawsuits against the clubs that employ them, claiming exploitation…of the financial kind. As the economy worsened, clubs tried to take a larger cut of dancers’ falling tip incomes.

John visited his local Rhode Island Subway every weekday for the past two months to enjoy what he thought was a healthy lunch. That all came to end after he overheard a Subway worker say to her colleague: “I don’t know how anybody could eat this stuff everyday. It’s disgusting and it will make you fat.”

The workers at the FedEx Kinkos in Astor Place didn’t know how to react when reader Eric asked to overnight a letter. They were apparently trained to handle only the Kinkos side of the store, and weren’t sure how to ship Eric’s parcel—a school board election ballot—to Hackensack, New Jersey. Their solution was both innovative and idiotic: they told Eric to write his credit card info on a slip of paper, and promised to take care of everything the next morning.

With the Gap embarrassed this week by reports that Indian children as young as 10 were making Gap Kids clothing, a lot of people are asking, just how frequently and to what degree do large U.S. companies like Gap and Wal-Mart monitor their foreign manufacturers? According to Slate, “anywhere from six months to once every several years.” Unfortunately, because the visits are usually announced ahead of time, factories can hide violations, coach employees on what to say, get rid of the child workers, and forge records. In China, there are consultants who will prepare a factory for inspection, going so far as to fake missing records.

Lines the length of city blocks filled New York’s LaGuardia airport Saturday morning after a careless worker spilled tomato juice onto one of the five x-ray machines in the American Airlines terminal. A TSA spokesman cast the tomato juice’s victory over the machines as a failure of science, saying: “That’s the risk you take when you deal with technology.” Passengers were understandably pissed.

When CBS 2 HD told one woman the reason for the delays, she asked if we were “kidding,” but it was no joke. The Transportation Safety Administration confirmed the spill knocked out one of the five units that screen thousands of passengers here each day.

Steven Mandel, associate solicitor in the U.S. Labor Department’s Fair Labor Standards Division, said the case — involving nearly 87,000 employees nationwide — resulted from Wal-Mart coming to the department in early 2005 and asking for a review of its overtime calculations.

While celebrating Worker Memorial Day, our eye was caught by the mention of Safety Bingo Inc as being one of the top twelve most dangerous companies. At first glance, we assume it was one of those psyop-like games the therapist use to make us play i.e. “Johnny steals your apple. Do you a) punch him b) yell at him c) cry d) tell a teacher?” And guess what, answer D lets you move forward four spaces in the game, whereas answer D in real life gets your ass kicked.

The Danes — long used to the luxury of boozing it up with a flagon of ale through their breaks and then stumbling back to the mill to use their omni-digital and claw-like hands to tremblingly feed another log through the buzz saw — are up in arms over attempts to curtail their lunchtime inebriation.